NYSC stands for National Youth Service Corps. It is a one-year program established by the federal government of Nigeria for graduate who are just rounding their program in the higher institution, to live the comfort of their home to an entirely new environment far from their home. There in the new environment, they will live and serve their father land for a period of one-year. Just like a soldier living his family to a new place he might not know about.
The journey that started about a year ago has finally come to an end. The NYSC program gave me not just friends but brothers and sisters. It gave me family. We all came from different background, different social life style, different ethnic group and from different part of the country to an entirely new environment that was like a war ground.
At the beginning of our stay in the new environment, everyone was complaining of how the environment was. Imagine leaving your luxurious life style, your comfortable home with comfortable bed and cold air condition system to an environment that has no electricity, no good drinkable water system, no good source of mobile network, the roads are bad and it’s like 30km or more away from the main town.
Honestly, leaving in such an environment was never easy but at the end we were able to scaled through. We were able to overcome those challenges and difficulties. Some of my colleagues fell seriously ill and was rushed to the hospital, some applied for relocation to different places all because the body system was finding it difficult to adapt to the new environment.
Some of us were able to acclimatize to the environment, blend with the peoples’ culture and traditions, even learning how to speak their native language.
Most of us took this service year as a vacation. One fun part of leaving in the new environment was that it’s surrounded by mountains. Most times we go for hiking on those mountains. From the top, we could see tiny houses, everything below was so small.
Even though I was away from my family for over a year, I get to make new family. One thing that took me by surprise was that some of my colleagues, four of them to be precise actually schooled in the same higher institution with me. We spend over four to five years in the same university but never met each other because the school is big and all of us came from different departments but because of our service (NYSC), we met each other, became friends, not just friends but family.
Today we are celebrating our last days together, everyone will go back to where he or she came from. But even as we parted, the bond still remains. The joy of the service was that some of my colleagues came, met each other and became lovers, other are in a romantic relationship and other have fixed their wedding date already.
It was really fun having my guys around and I’m definitely going to miss them all.
